Feature Articles

Calm before the Storm - Competition Mechanics

Calm before the Storm - Competition Mechanics

The basic premise behind MOA 2009 is no different from that of other overclocking competitions. The key here is to achieve the maximum amount of performance gain by overclocking the components. Judges from MSI will run the benchmarks using the same equipment as the contestants without any overclocking done to obtain a baseline score. This will then be compared to these scores obtained from the contestant's overclocked system - largest gain wins, of course.

The competition will be split into two phases. Phase One will involve wPrime, a popular benchmarking tool which involves calculating the square root of obscenely large numbers - up to 32 billion. This is a CPU-intensive test. Two hours will be given to the contestants to tweak and to obtain a result. Once they are satisfied, the results can be submitted. Within the two hours, contestants can re-run and re-submit as many results as they like.

Phase Two involves 3DMark Vantage and this time, the GPU will be called into play. Here, contestants will be given three hours to tweak and complete a successful run, after which scores can be submitted. Again, contestants have the full three hours to fiddle with their systems and submit as many scores they want.

To aid the contestant in their endeavors, only the top of the line equipment were used. This is the list of components used for MOA 2009:

Intel Core i7 Extreme 975

MSI Eclipse SLI

OCZ Blade DDR3-2133 Triple Channel Memory Kit

MSI N275GTX Lightning

Western Digital RE3 750GB

Antec CP-1000

LG W2254TQ

The systems were all running on 64-bit Window Vista SP2 and the contestants were provided with the following BIOS, drivers and utilities:

MOA Special Edition BIOS

NVIDIA ForceWare 190.38

wPrime v2.00

3DMark Vantage v.1.0.1

SetFSB 2.2.125.92

CPU-Z 1.52

GPU-Z 0.3.4

RivaTuner beta

version

MemSet 4.0

MSI Lightning Afterburner

MSI Overclocking Center

The stage is set and the battle is about to begin. This is it. For the contestants there's no turning back. Let the battle begin.